In 2001 I went on @theviewabc to promote The Anniversary Party. Just before we went to air Barbara Walters appeared in my dressing room like a ball of effervescent peach, and said ‘I want to talk to you about the drugs’. She was referring to the drug use depicted in the movie but I felt like I was in an intervention. Then during the broadcast the ladies had somehow found out some salacious gossip and as you can see Barbara played along with me and made what might have been really awkward into a total hoot. I suppose both those moments really encompass what she was- the serious moral arbiter but also the goofball, and definitely the flirt. About a year later I answered the phone in my trailer at work and a voice said ‘Alan Cumming, I have Barbara Walters for you’. ‘Yeah, right!’ I said and wondered who was pranking me. But it was indeed Barbara, inviting me to a dinner she was throwing for some mutual friends. A few weeks later I arrived at her swanky uptown apartment, nervous and early - both unusual traits for me going out on the town. The doorman called the elevator and I set off up to Barbara’s eyrie, giggling to myself at the absurdity of it all. It was one of those elevators that opens immediately into the person’s apartment and so there she was in her hallway waiting for me, aglow again as usual. ‘Alan’, she purred. ‘It’s only me. It was all a ruse!’ I gulped, trying to take in the concept of Barbara blooming Walters luring me to a dinner à deux under false pretenses. Then a caterer with a tray of drinks walked past in the room behind her and I gasped at her mischief as we both cracked up. I saw her often after that. She was always at the theatre, at parties (so then, I suppose, was I!) and she was always charming and witty and hilarious, able to jump from the profound to the mundane in an instant, equally at home with both. Were it not for her having been MIA for the last few years, ill health curtailing even her voracious appetite for life and fun, I bet we would have seen her at @clubcumming, chatting to the kids and glowing.